Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T20:05:36.526Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

21 - Public opinion and the political pamphlet

from PART IV - LITERATURE AND SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
J. A. Downie
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

The people of England, it is generally observed, are, of all nations in the world, the most addicted to Politics. The fact is certain, and the reason of it evident.

Jürgen Habermas' influential model of the rise of public opinion as a force in the state argues that ‘[a] public sphere that functioned in the political realm arose first in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century’ when, with the end of censorship, ‘a press devoted to the debate of political issues developed out of the pamphlet’. The principle of universal access is central to Habermas' thesis about the emergence (as opposed to the structural transformation) of the bourgeois public sphere. ‘A public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete’, he explains, ‘it was not a public sphere at all.’ As it consists of ‘private persons come together as a public’, the public sphere, in its appeal to reason as a governing principle, is in a crucial sense disinterested.

The period from the later seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries has been described, quite rightly, as ‘the first age of party’. This inevitably presents problems for a thesis in which ‘rational-critical’ debate is posited as being somehow free from party-political (or any other) considerations. On the contrary, it is clear that politicians immediately appreciated the possibilities presented by the existence of a free press for influencing parliamentary as well as public opinion. While Edmund Burke was drafting Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), he received a letter from the Marquis of Rockingham:

I wish it may be read by all the members of Parliament – and by all the politicians in town and country prior to the meeting of Parliament. I think it would take universally, and tend to form and to unite a party upon real and well founded principles – which would in the end prevail and re-establish order and Government in this country.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 549 - 571
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Addison, Joseph, The Freeholder, ed. James, LehenyOxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Astbury, Raymond, ‘The Renewal of the Licensing Act in 1693 and its Lapse in 1695’, The Library, 5th series, 33 (1978).Google Scholar
Boulton, James T., The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke, London: Rout-ledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963; rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975.Google Scholar
Brewer, John, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. O'Brien, Conor Cruise, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 8 vols., ed. Langford, Paul, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Claeys, Gregory (ed.), Political Writings of the 1790s, 6 vols., London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995.Google Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art’, in Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, Raysor, Thomas Middleton, London: Constable, 1936.Google Scholar
Defoe, Daniel, Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. Owens, W. R. and Furbank, P. N, 8 vols., London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000.Google Scholar
Dickinson, H. T., Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977.Google Scholar
Downie, J. A., Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Downie, J. A., and Corns, Thomas N. (eds.), Telling People What to Think: Early Eighteenth-Century Periodicals from ‘The Review’ to ‘The Rambler’, London and Portland, Oregon: Frank Cass, 1993.Google Scholar
Ellis, Frank H., ed., Swift vs. Mainwaring: ‘The Examiner’ and ‘The Medley’, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Fielding, Henry, The True Patriot and Related Writings, ed. Coley, W. B.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Goldgar, Bertrand A., Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Harris, Robert, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the Poets, ed. Hill, G. B., 3 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905.Google Scholar
Johnson, Samuel, Political Writings, ed. Greene, Donald J., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.Google Scholar
‘Junius’, The Letters of Junius, ed. Cannon, John, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Catherine, Observations on a Pamphlet (London, 1770), p..Google Scholar
Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man, ed. Collins, Henry, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Google Scholar
Price, Richard, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (, 1789), p..Google Scholar
Rea, Robert R., The English Press in Politics, 1760–1774, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Reid, Christopher, Edmund Burke and the Practice of Political Writing, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985.Google Scholar
Ribble, Frederick G., ‘Fielding's Rapprochement with Walpole in late 1741’, Philological Quarterly 80 (2001).Google Scholar
Snyder, Henry L., ‘Arthur Maynwaring and the Whig Press, 1710–1712’, in Haas, Rudolf, Müllenbrock, Heinz-Joachim and Uhlig, Claus (eds.), Literatur als Kritik des Lebens (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1977) –36.Google Scholar
[St John, Henry, Bolingbroke, Viscount,] A Dissertation upon Parties, London, 1735.Google Scholar
[St John, Henry, Bolingbroke, Viscount,] Remarks on the History of England, London, 1743.Google Scholar
Swift, Jonathan, Prose Works, ed. Davis, Herbert et al., 16 vols., Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939–75.Google Scholar
Trenchard, John, and Gordon, Thomas, Cato's Letters, 2 vols., ed. Hamowy, RonaldIndianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1995.Google Scholar
Wilkes, John, A Letter to Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. (London, 1770).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×